Apple to Use Intel Microprocessors Beginning in 2006

June 6th, 2005 · No Comments

I’ve been following this one since Friday since C-Net leaked it. Apple are moving from IBM PPC to Intel x86.

Don’t get your hopes up though for running OS X any any old Intel box - it won’t work. Apple will still be a hardware/software vendor and OS X will run on nothing but Apple kit. x86 doesn’t mean you’re going to see OS X on a Dell. Thank fuck.

However, [Apple Senior Vice President Phil] Schiller said the company does not plan to let people run Mac OS X on other computer makers’ hardware. “We will not allow running Mac OS X on anything other than an Apple Mac.”

Tiger was shown at the Apple conference today running on a quad 3.6 GHZ tower. Fast? Yes.

Intel are annoyed at Microsoft, as they chose IBM chips for the Xbox 2.

IBM don’t need Apple, they supply all the next generation consoles, they wouldn’t drop the price of PPC chips and couldn’t come up with chips that could run cool enough for Apple to produce a G5 PowerBook.

Intel can. 3GHZ PowerBooks will be out next year IMO.

“I stood up here two years ago and promised you 3.0 GHz. I think a lot of you would like a G5 in your PowerBook, and we haven’t been able to deliver that to you,” said Jobs. “But as we look ahead, and though we’ve got great products now, and great PowerPC products still to come, we can envision great products we want to build, and we can’t envision how to build them with the current PowerPC roadmap,”

- Steve Jobs

Looks like I might get a spanky new PowerBook between Christmas 2006 and March 2007 - a second generation Intel one. I’ll skip the first generation, thanks.